One example of this in my family comes from when my dad was a teenager. He grew up outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and had joined a national youth pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal. On the first day, after having arrived at the pilgrims’ center, he decided to take a nap because of some jetlag. He woke up late and was the last one to show up at the dining hall for dinner. The only seat left available for him was next to a young man from Michigan who, during the course of the pilgrimage, became one of his best friends. When they returned home, they kept in regular contact until one day, when my dad called his new friend on the phone, it wasn’t him who answered, but his younger sister. My dad and this young woman started talking and, in time, that young woman became my mother! Had my dad not decided to go on that pilgrimage, or take a nap, or oversleep, one marriage, six children, and 27 grandchildren would’ve never existed!

Needless to say, Our Lady of Fatima holds a dear place in our family. From an early age, we learned the story of how Mary appeared to three shepherd children in a small village called Fatima in Portugal, how she taught the children to pray, how she revealed to them the impending dangers to mankind if we didn’t turn back to God, and the need for prayer and penance for those in the deep poverty of sin. In addition to the visions of Our Lady and angels, the children famously had a vision of hell, and during the final visitation of Our Lady to the children, there was a miracle of the sun where thousands of attendees saw the sun dance in the sky and then plummet to the earth. When the sun returned to its place in the sky, the crowds, who had previously been drenched in a downpour of rain and been standing in the mud, were suddenly completely dry. Newspapers of the day reported on the miracle with the testimony of many eyewitnesses.

The feast of Our Lady of Fatima falls every year on May 13. It commemorates the first of her six visits to the three children in 1917 and invites us to reconsider the requests of Our Lady. The apparitions took place during the final months of World War I, or “The Great War.” The world had never seen a conflict on that scale before and Mary warned the children that an even greater war (World War II) would take place if people did not turn back to God and pray the rosary every day for peace. As we now know, her warnings were left unheeded and that greater war did in fact take place. But even more urgent and concerning was her message about how many souls were in danger of dying outside of God’s grace and spending eternity in hell. Mary urged that prayers and sacrifices be made for these people so they would turn back to God. Mary instructed, “Make sacrifices for sinners, and say often, especially while making a sacrifice: O Jesus, this is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for offences committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

Mary’s message to the three children seems even more urgent now than when she first delivered it over 100 years ago. Our world is ravaged in war and as a society we’ve gone into a freefall from God’s grace. If Mary was concerned about how many souls were in danger of hell in 1917, I can only imagine what it must be like now!

It would be good to use the feast day this month to take heed of Mary’s instructions. Maybe say a rosary on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima and consider making it a part of your regular devotions. It is a very beautiful and scripturally based prayer of meditation on the Gospel. If you have never prayed the rosary before or you can’t remember how, there are easy to follow instructions here: www.usccb.org/how-to-pray-the-rosary. Also, as a family, you could choose some small sacrifice to offer to Jesus on behalf of the souls who are in danger of rejecting him that day, praying that they might be open to receiving the love and grace of God so as to spend eternity in his loving embrace.

The message of Our Lady of Fatima is a great mercy to us, we should take encouragement from it that God cares for us and wants us to accept his love! God bless.